Huawei launches Mission Critical Cloud for New-Age Banking

At Huawei connect 2016 Huawei announced a new innovation from its industry collaborations in the financial sector.

The New Financial Cloud Solution for Mission Critical jointly developed by Huawei and Infosys Finacle, designed to ease some of the IT challenges of the finance and banking sectors.

The new innovation is based on the Huawei FusionCloud platform and the world’s first 32-socket Mission Critical server KunLun, integrated with the world’s leading banking system – Infosys Finacle, which includes its entire suite of products such as core banking system, online banking, mobile banking, customer relationship management (CRM) and wealth management. The best-in-class technology has been specifically designed to help financial institutions reduce total cost ownership (TCO), improve agility, and accelerate digitalization.

Transformation and Innovation for the Financial Industry

“Transformation” and “Innovation” formed the central messaging for the sessions at the 2016 Huawei Finance Industry Summit. Richard Longo, Global Head of Marketing and Alliances at Infosys, and Diana Yuan, president of marketing and solutions sales of Huawei’s Enterprise Business Group (Enterprise BG), jointly announced the Mission Critical Cloud Solution at the summit.

Diana Yuan shared, “Powerful forces are reshaping the financial industry, transformation is vital to remaining competitive but there are multiple challenges associated with making this a reality. Huawei recognizes customer needs as the primary force driving ICT deployment. Huawei’s work with Infosys allows us to better understand the needs of the customer, and also carry out business-driven ICT infrastructure (BDII) construction. With this partnership, we can merge the latest innovations with detailed industry expertise, ensuring that we can co-create and deliver solutions and experiences that go beyond the sum of our individual capacities.”

Brett King, industry pioneer and author of the book BANK 3.0, gave the keynote address entitled “Winning strategies and key digital trends for Bank 3.0”. As part of his key-note, he said: “Banking is no longer somewhere you go, but something you do. This means that in a Bank 3.0 world, customer and consumer behaviors will change radically. Bank cards and cash will no longer exist. Customers will no longer need banks to be a finance channel. Instead banking will become more of a lifestyle,”

“That means banks need to respond to this consumer shift and use new technologies such as mobile Internet, smart devices, and machine interaction in order to place the customer at the center of the process. In essence, banks must completely revolutionize their branches, processes, management, and systems. Through the implementation of new innovation, banks can improve both their own efficiency and the customer experience, creating win-win outcomes and new competitiveness in the digital era,” he added.

Huawei hosted the Finance Industry Summit with the theme “Reshaping IT, Bank for Digital Transformation”, which was hosted by Emmanuel Daniel, chairman of the globally renowned fiscal think-tank, The Asian Banker. The summit hosted over 600 financial industry executives from around the world, who convened to discuss latest industry topics such as business transformation for the banking sector, sharing bank digitization strategies, bank/broker finance cloud practices, mid-range computer migration planning, big data applications, and FinTech innovations.

Banks move to all-cloud services

There is a new global trend among financial institutions looking to deploy cloud in multiple services areas. To meet this need, Huawei has developed a series of strategic partnerships and innovative cloud infrastructure projects with several major banks in China and elsewhere around the world. These include China Merchants Bank, China Construction Bank, Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, and Santander.

Gao Xulei, China Merchants Bank’s director of data centers said in his remarks, “Industry surveys have shown that 100% of respondents said security was their main worry about using public cloud. We now have access to innovation that can meet this most vital customer concern.”

Gao expanded saying that impeccable security must be achieved through a combination of checks and processes which includes highly reliable cloud security, risk control and audit systems, and data security systems. He also said that reliable, user-friendly cloud architecture demands both high quality physical infrastructure and highly available data architecture.

Huawei serves over 300 financial institutions worldwide, including six of the world’s top ten banks. Huawei also has wide-ranging partnerships with a dozen major banks worldwide. In Hall A at the Shanghai Expo Centre, Huawei has set up a display of all of the finance industry solutions it offers. These include three key scenarios for large banks: self-operated private cloud, industry public cloud, and cloud appliance. These scenarios have attracted considerable interest within the financial industry.